


Upon the Edge of a Knife

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [28]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Bank Robbery, Brainwashing, Class Issues, Drama, Earth-3, F/M, Gen, Good!Zsasz is still a loony toon, Gotham City Police Department, Humor, Jason Todd is a Talon, Mirror Universe, Moral Bankruptcy, Owlman and his dead rich parents, Owlman is a monster, You Have Been Warned, Zsasz and his dead rich parents, and fond of knives, treated by the asshole narrator as a good thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8325682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: "Lieutenant." Bruce set down his pen. "I'm told you have news on our quixotic Robin Hood?"A sharp nod. "We believe we've identified the criminal, Mr. Wayne." Lieutenant James Gordon, Major Crimes, stood almost at attention in front of the mighty desk, torn between his knowledge of where real power lay and his stubborn pride, hanging onto the fact that Bruce was nowhere in his chain of command.Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Not the Jokester, after all? Do tell."





	1. Sagitta

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: I've been informed that some of us don't know Zsasz but may wish to read the story anyway for its place in the series, which is a thing I should have realized on my own. Whoops! 
> 
> The canon Zsasz is a creepy villain, Batman's only recurring serial killer as-such, as opposed to villains who kill people a lot but don't fall into any normal serial killer patterns. Zsasz prefers a knife and cuts a tally mark into his own skin for every murder. There are a lot of marks. His philosophy/delusions revolve around the idea that people are really just zombies that need to be put down, not because they're in any way dangerous but just because. He really enjoys shedding blood and inflicting terror, and is prone to horror movie jump-scares.

Gotham City was having a problem with bank robbery.

Not stickups, and not strictly banks, either—more specifically, it was having a problem with _vault_ robbery.

This was supposed to be an obsolete problem. The heyday of the bank robber had been over a hundred years ago, before security engineers had decisively won their arms race against vault-crackers and rendered this type of robbery almost never worth the investment. Bank vaults were no longer even particularly valuable, in this modern era of electronic funds transfers and high-speed stock trading.

And yet here they were. One vault after another, penetrated and plundered by mysterious means.

The perpetrator had never been spotted, and had almost entirely avoided being caught on camera. All they had were a few dozen blurry seconds, from three different security systems, showing a single masked man in a hooded jacket. Both garments had been identified as cheap, mass-produced goods, impossible to track. The gloves seemed to be leather and might be very slightly more distinctive, but none of the footage had been nearly good enough to even begin, and no fragments had been discovered by forensic teams.

The criminal's inexplicable knack for breaking into secure facilities and removing the contents seemed to be his only distinctive quality.

Thus far, he had focused mostly on removing cash from banks, probably for ease of transport, but had also emptied safe-deposit boxes and raided several private and non-bank facilities, including the Gotham Grand Hotel vault, the central post office, and a least one home strongroom. The Gotham Central Library's rare-books collection had doubled its (unimpressive) security.

All but one of the thirteen robberies had impinged in some way upon the property of members of the Court of Owls; since there were no indications that the criminal in question had previously operated in any other city, it was hard to tell whether this was an intentional strike against the Court itself, a generalized hostility toward the wealthy and powerful, or merely a matter of those who possessed a majority of the existing wealth making the largest and most obvious targets for its unlawful removal.

GCPD efforts in response had been unstinting, but not particularly effectual.

Bruce admitted to some responsibility in that regard. Seizing control of the police force had of course been essential to his goals, but while doing so in two separate identities with slightly differing means provided the security of redundancy, it had also fostered a certain level of internal disorganization; Bruce Wayne's and Owlman's bought men working at cross purposes even when given identical instructions. (Even, in some cases, when they were _the same individual_. Sometimes Bruce despaired of the common man.)

There was also, according to reports, a distinct shortage of department morale. Bruce was fairly sure this was not his problem. People kept reporting it anyway. Mostly in contexts where he could not punish them for wasting his time, as he would from behind his mask. Being a law-abiding citizen was such a chore.

Still, progress was being made, even if he fully expected the police to ultimately be merely an information-gathering tool in his own investigation. After a fairly important deposit box of his own had been emptied by the thief, he had publicly donated to the city several valuable pieces of forensic analysis equipment, which would serve the dual purpose of tax write-off and making the police force more useful in capturing this gnat.

He could always have them sabotaged later if they became inconvenient to his own operations.

These contributions had included the materials for RFID tagging to track future stolen goods, which Bruce had not truly expected to work considering the level of professionalism the mysterious individual had applied to his safecracking, but it had failed in an unexpected _way_. The bait, laid in the largest Bank of America location in Gotham, had been taken. The marked bills had then proceeded to turn up all over Gotham and beyond, in an ever-expanding cloud of useless signals—as best anyone could tell, the robber had begun distributing money as soon as he made his getaway, in quantities of five to five hundred bills at once.

Those beneficiaries caught with large quantities were being charged with conspiracy, but most seemed to have spent it hurriedly, often on transport out of the city. Much of the carefully tagged money was now more or less irrecoverable.

The accused conspirators were mostly falling over themselves to be helpful, but even the ones who had seen the person leaving the gift had little to say that surveillance footage hadn't told. Their benefactor was male, of average height, with his face hidden. Gloves to the elbow concealed even his race.

"I thought it was Mothman," one middle-aged woman kept insisting. "I turned around and there was a packet of money, just when I was behind on a lot of bills! That's something Mothman does, everybody knows that. Usually while people are asleep, and he never talks about it—look, are you sure it wasn't Mothman? I just want to pay the electric!"

It gave Bruce a headache.

Now he pushed the intercom button on his desk, absently reviewing the paperwork before him for anything his subordinates might be foolishly trying to slip under his nose. "Send him in."

His personal secretary was well educated in martial arts and counter-espionage, and good with spreadsheets. Only the latter skillset saw regular use, but he paid her in keeping with the first two. He had no intention of letting disorder reach the point that he faced an assault on his workspace, but it was best to have contingencies.

The office door opened, and a uniformed GCPD officer entered.

"Lieutenant." Bruce set down his pen. "I'm told you have news on our quixotic Robin Hood?"

A sharp nod. "We believe we've identified the criminal, Mr. Wayne." Lieutenant James Gordon, Major Crimes, stood almost at attention in front of the mighty desk, torn between his knowledge of where real power lay and his stubborn pride, hanging onto the fact that Bruce was nowhere in his chain of command.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. "Not the Jokester, after all? Do tell."

Gordon shook his head at the rhetorical question. "The MO was close, but we had the clown in custody. There were police eyes on him at the time of the third heist."

Not during any of those since, but not because he had escaped yet again, and Gordon noticeably said nothing about this. People disappeared from custody sometimes, in Gotham, and he knew the signs as well as any veteran; knew that both of them knew that if the Jokester _was_ behind this, it was only by proxy. But that was all speculation. The third heist—Gotham Central Bank—was _fact._ They had had him, then.

Bruce had reviewed the footage from that time, in fact. The infuriating piece of scum, flanked by two officers, had been vocally delighted by both the company in his cell and the idea that someone was committing crimes similar enough to his own that he was suspected. 'Keeping up the side,' he called it, and then went off on a rant that, once decoded, appeared to be about British football hooligans, and possibly also cricket. If there was an actual message lurking within the madness, it wasn't worth Bruce's time to search further.

He inclined his head in acknowledgment of Gordon's paltry fact.

"But we got a partial fingerprint from one of the bomb casings. Most of the probable matches the database turned up are dead or incarcerated, but we have a likely suspect." Finally, the lieutenant pulled the file he'd had tucked under his arm and moved to set it on the desk. Bruce preempted the move, taking it from Gordon's hand himself, and flipped it open as the older man specified, "One Victor Zsasz."

Bruce raised his eyebrows. There was a five-by-eight glossy paperclipped to the inside of the file, a blond man in a tailored suit, not quite looking at the camera.

"He was declared missing last January," Gordon continued, after a tense few seconds of trying to gauge Bruce's thoughts on the matter. "After his lease ran out and his landlord contacted the cousin whose name he'd listed for emergencies. A basic report was filed."

No investigation, clearly, had been done. This was to be expected; investigating missing persons in Gotham was not a rewarding occupation, unless you considered a knife between the ribs a desirable reward. Bruce did not care to have his business meddled in.

"I recognize the name," Bruce said, as Gordon's hesitation drew on. "Continue."

"Zsasz's involvement is being assumed. We don't know if he's being coerced into helping with the technical aspects, or whether he's masterminding the operation."

"How likely is it that Zsasz is the one in the mask?"

"The…perpetrator appears to approximately share his build. More likely he's just handling the mechanical end. It turns out he was halfway to an engineering degree before his father made him switch majors."

Interesting. And, he would have said, in-character. Certainly more so than vault-cracking.

"I see. Well, perhaps when next he strikes your department will be prepared to strike back, and we can get to the bottom of all this. Is there anything else to report?"

"Only that we're still diligently pursuing the case."

"I see," Bruce repeated. "Well, I appreciate Commissioner Loeb's efforts to keep me informed. You will let me know if anything further crops up, won't you?"

"Yes…" A long, heavy pause, in which Bruce did not bother not to smile. Woodenly, Gordon concluded, "Sir."

It never failed to improve Bruce's mood, watching the lieutenant struggle with himself. It had been a long time since self-preservation last lost out to pride.

It was petty, he knew, exacting vengeance drop by drop from someone who had no idea why he had been singled out by the hidden king, why Owlman should have taken particular offense to _his_ attempts to administer his own sense of justice, when there were other rebellious, principle-driven officers in Gotham. It was petty, but he could allow himself his small entertainments.

The others were punished, too, of course; often swiftly and finally, and with no need for any direct input on his part. But Gordon…Gordon, he dealt with _personally_. Eventually, the man would accept the reality that there was nothing he could do but submit.

 _Did you put your hand on your son's shoulder, while he was dying, Jim?_ he wondered idly, as he had before. _Did you tell him that it was going to_ _ **be alright?**_

_You shouldn't lie to children, officer. Some of them can hold a grudge._

"Thank you, Lieutenant," he said, savoring the moment just a little. "That will be all."

With the policeman gone, Bruce sat back in his chair—a twin of the one at the heart of his secret fortress, engineered to his precise specifications—and steepled his hands, to think. So. A lead at last.

Zsasz, Victor. A ruined man. Not Bruce's doing, for once—he had purchased the family company soon after Victor inherited, but it was Zsasz himself who had gambled and speculated and lost everything. His fingerprints, it proved on perusal of the police file, were in the system on a drunk driving charge from six years ago, which was in keeping with the man as Bruce most recently remembered him.

Bruce had seen him at social functions occasionally, both before and after the sale, and over time he had noticed a certain manic intensity beginning to underlie Zsasz's dedicated hedonism—he'd regretted giving up his parents' legacy, clearly, though he'd only ever had the illusion of a choice about it; Wayne Enterprises always got what it wanted. There had been an interestingly desperate note lurking in the most innocuous of comments. Even at his least stable, however, Zsasz had never been a danger to anyone but himself, DWI aside. A genuine gentleman, Bruce recalled one of the more romantically inclined socialites calling him. The distrait, refined type. Easily taken advantage of.

As had happened, leaving him penniless. Not, of course, entirely without resources—he had had a bachelor's degree, and enough old friends positioned to offer him comfortable employment that he could almost certainly have scraped together a middle-class sort of existence. If Bruce had thought to wonder about him after he disappeared from the social circuit, he would have assumed either that or death, and not cared particularly either way.

It seemed that his assumption would have been wrong.

He smiled. Even with no one to see, it was a thin, cool thing, that betrayed no vulnerability. But it was as perfectly sincere as he was capable of being.

A target was all he'd needed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short first chapter! That actually is Zsasz's backstory, incredibly enough. He is yet another in the long parade of Batman villains designed to be the hero's mirror in some way. (This makes writing mirror Gotham kind of trippy, though it's not nearly as bad as the Flash.) He also has a history of being very, very, very good at penetrating security without getting caught. He _literally_ strolled in and out of Arkham at will for a while.
> 
> And yes, Owlman's motive for screwing with Jim actually is that young officer Gordon attempted to comfort him after his parents died. He's been clinging to the resentment ever since. Some of Bruce's less attractive personality traits get _really_ nasty when he has no moral scruples or sense of decency. Tosser.


	2. Ophiuchus

The GCPD laid ambushes around all remaining possible targets, that night. The manpower was hard to raise—most officers were pulling overtime from now until the trap was sprung, and the rest of the city was on a skeleton staff, but Bruce could keep moderate order through his criminal enterprises in the short term.

He himself would be at the nerve center of the operation, at Police Headquarters with Loeb. If anything arose in which Owlman needed to intervene, Bruce Wayne could make his excuses.

The cowl often mussed his hair, and he smoothed it now before the mirror in his private suite in Wayne Tower, used far more often for switching masks than for sleep. He tightened his tie—ironic, he always thought, that important men walked about wearing nooses they had tied themselves, but that was the custom—and glanced over at the small operative in the red cape, who stood in the corner, posture alert but not visibly tense.

"Mission is go. I've dispersed lesser agents to cover the outlying locations. Your station is at point Delta," he directed. It was a centrally located rooftop point with wide visibility; Talon would be able to get to any of the five most densely spaced potential targets within two minutes of the alarm.

Talon nodded. "Yes, sir. I can—"

Bruce raised a hand. Talon froze. "What have I told you?" he chided. "When your work speaks for you, _don't interrupt_."

Talon bowed, silently, criticism received. Bruce would let him off with a warning, this time. He really had improved marvelously in the last months; excessive eagerness to please was a forgivable trespass.

"Go."

Another bow, and the small bird of prey was away.

With just the right degree of alacrity, Bruce observed with satisfaction. Nothing about his motion could be considered leisurely, but neither was there any of the indignity of hurry—hurry which, after all, suggested that something might be on the brink of escaping control.

'Whoever is in a hurry,' the fourth Earl of Chesterfield had written, 'shows that whatever he is about is too big for him.'

Bruce was fond of aphorisms. Their formulaic, repetitive quality made them well suited to communicating with idiots—either the concepts so encapsulated were simplified enough to make it through even the thickest skulls, eventually, or they were incomprehensible enough for the dullard in question to quickly recognize his own incapacity, and give up. He was called upon to speak with so _many_ idiots, it was an extremely useful strategy.

Like the koans they resembled, aphorisms could also serve as good meditative foci.

His father's favorite maxim had been, _it never rains but it pours,_ usually muttered wryly when the business of Wayne Industries and call for him at the hospital had struck together—a fact which had done something to moderate the womanishness of the saying in Bruce's eyes. He had observed the same tendency in his own double life, though he maintained a much stricter grasp on both elements, and did not allow himself to be controlled by the demands of his subordinates.

His own preference had, over the years, come to be for that old truism, that _every man has his price._

There could be no doubt of its essential veracity. There was not one man or woman the world over who was truly incorruptible. Sometimes the most dangerous of men had the easiest prices—Ultraman, for example, could be rendered almost reliable by regular signs of esteem interspersed with subtle scorn, so long as he was also provided with external challenges and periodic validation from the masses, even if that validation was in the form of stark terror. It would have almost been boring, without the fact that any error of manipulation might lead to having one's head twisted off before human eyes could register motion.

Most were even simpler. Most could be outright _bought._ If not with money, then with favors or advancements. Everyone had a price.

Most, however, valued themselves at far more than they were worth, and Bruce was far too much the businessman to let himself be bilked. Therefore he cultivated only the valuable few on their own terms: for the others, if they were worth buying at all, he established monopoly, or at least dominance, in the field of employment, and let them fight for the right to sell themselves to him.

There was a functional beauty to it, like the jaws of a perfectly weighted trap.

The flaw of this system was the same as its strength: Bought men could always be repurchased by another. Fear was an excellent insurance against this, but never perfect. No matter how supreme he made his own menace, a coward could still give way to a more _immediate_ threat, or bribe, and hope to avoid his notice or outrun his retaliation.

Those who sold _themselves_ usually considered the bargain revocable.

Therefore, a truly reliable agent was one to whom this did not occur as a possibility.

Those who might not stay bought could still be relied upon to remain _broken_.

Bruce had the deepest faith in his own philosophy. It had carried him through adolescence into adulthood, perpetually refined and improved as he forced the universe to bow to his will. In the art of total rule he acknowledged only one possible superior, and the Superwoman relied far too heavily on magical shortcuts to break her servants' wills, as well as regularly indulging her own appetites in disgusting displays of hedonism. Owlman, relying purely on his knowledge of psychology and strict self-discipline, was the superior artist.

_And yet his first Talon had still run._

It had taken him a very long time to believe it. Although he could find no trace of any of his enemies or supposed-allies holding the boy, although it would take either immense personal ability or overwhelming numbers to subdue his operative, and although the latter fight would be _impossible_ to completely hide, for months he had nevertheless put the disappearance down to foul play.

He had searched with the same single-minded ferocity that he had once spent on identifying and destroying the slug that had dared to take his family from him, with more determined intent than he had spent on any enemy since, enraged by the sheer unbearable _insult_ of it. His focus had almost distracted him from taking the necessary measures to deflect the parallel _official_ investigation from focusing too closely on Gotham, but he had prepared the resources and agents-in-place for the purpose ahead of time, and it had not required much attention to enact.

Bad enough Talon had been seen, had been _unmasked_ , bad enough that one of Wilson's sons had lived. To have his right hand _taken_ from him at the same time, just when he had grown enough to reach his most useful….

After ruling out treachery from within his Court through the strictest of measures, Bruce had eventually come to suspect either that some covert branch of government had seized the operative and declined to inform any other branch, and had shipped him to an existing research location to discover the secrets of the Talons ( _unacceptable_ ), that one of three particularly secretive secret societies which he had already been itching for a reason to sink his claws into had done something similar, or else that someone, somehow, had managed to _kill_ the Talon.

No common organization could have completely hidden the ripples of holding such an unusual prisoner. Not from him.

It was only thirteen months after the fact, in which time he had burned the Challengers of the Unknown to the ground and started to seriously prepare to take on the Stormwatch, that one of his computers found a facial match in a photograph of a circus performance in Morocco, and he had begun to suspect the truth.

His Talon, his right hand, his utterly dependable weapon, who should not even have been able to articulate the concept of rebellion—had _deserted him_. Of the free will he should not have _had._

For almost the first time in his life, on that night Bruce had doubted. His methods, and thus his philosophy. It had been a dark night.

He had persevered.

It was the fault of the Court, he had concluded at last. His Talon had been acquired in his first months as the King, when he was still solidifying his authority and feeling out the rhythms and boundaries of the organization he had commandeered. Therefore the boy had been trained more or less according to the traditional methods, with only a few of his own interpolations into the structure. Those methods had, overall, a good success record—every Talon broke down eventually, became unusable, but very few had ever offered serious defiance. Few was not none, but Bruce had considered his own additions an insurance. Clearly, it had not been enough to make up for the existing deficiencies. Or the new ones he now perceived, in retrospect.

The problem lay in this: Bruce had, by stepping in and taking control of the Court, upset its balance and its self-image. The King of Owls by his existence made the Court look weak, cast its pettiness in sharp relief, and so every part of Talon's training that was geared toward instilling a deep-seated respect for the order itself had been compromised.

Talon was a symbol of the Court's power. Even to himself. His own failure in his mission against Slade Wilson would have weakened his belief in their inexorability. That, together with every flaw and failure common to the rabble, which even among his inner Court few could rise above…

No, he had concluded. His next Talon would be trained to see his duty as being entirely to the King, not the Court.

And he did not have the patience to wait for another circus brat to be selected, transformed, and grow to a useful size. Enough tradition. He would handle this his own way.

For nearly four hundred years, Talon candidates had been carefully selected. Young enough to be easily trainable, but already in possession of useful skills, and already having proven their capacity to concentrate, and learn, and _work._ Only the best were chosen for this destiny. Anything less was a waste of the Court's time and trouble.

It was particularly annoying, therefore, the _waste_ of it whenever a carefully scouted potential Talon failed to survive the conversion. If the Grayson boy had died on the table, there had been an even younger boy from a lesser family, Rose, next on the roster for consideration. When Bruce had acknowledged the need to begin training a replacement, four months and sixteen days after the disaster in Washington, his Court had stood ready to present him with the list of this decade's most likely candidates.

 _Don't bother_ , he'd dismissed them.

The younger a potential Talon was, the higher the chance that they would survive the electrum. But the younger a new Talon was, the longer it would take them to be particularly useful, even after conversion. Especially since—to his annoyance—the Grayson boy had in fact come to them unusually _well_ -trained, even for his subculture. The training period and the small physical size of the resulting operative had been inconvenient the first time; his timetables were disrupted enough already.

But an older subject was _much_ more likely to die.

The obvious course of action he had dismissed as sloppy—even in jurisdictions where he had significant influence, law enforcement would be hard-pressed to completely overlook a sudden international outbreak of child-acrobat kidnappings. Too unsubtle. Besides, with the transformation that television had inflicted on the entertainment world, there were relatively few appropriate targets _left—_ if he were to decimate this generation, there would be fewer to reproduce, and therefore fewer children with the appropriate attributes to be had in another twenty years. Short of breeding the captured stock and detailing a training regimen starting from infancy (something perhaps to consider for the future) the targets should be left unmolested until they could be of immediate use. To rule effectively, one must consider the long view.

No, he had resolved, this was the moment to attempt a new approach. Tradition was all very well, but it was purest foolishness to continue to do a thing simply because it had always been done before. When conditions changed, one must change with them.

There was no need to comb the world for a perfect weapon. Talon never came fully-formed, and Bruce had every faith in his own ability to shape what he required from raw materials.

 _Waste not, want not_ was one of those absurdly useful little expressions, and while Bruce certainly knew the importance of investing fully in worthwhile enterprises and not cutting corners merely to save a little in the short term, he would _much_ rather pour a large number of expendable lives into a potentially fruitless venture, than risk wasting the limited resource that was the usual Talon talent pool. That was only good business sense.

Of twenty subjects, then, there had been only one of sufficiently high quality to survive the conversion. Bruce would have preferred options, and perhaps the opportunity to set the trainees against one another for the right to serve, but this _had_ simplified things. And gave him more time to invest in shaping his new Talon _personally_.

The boy had hated him at first, of course. The first one had never had the opportunity, had been too young and then too well broken to bridle. The replacement was old enough to apportion blame, to know he had had an existence outside of service once, and it was entertaining, sometimes, to see it snapping in his eyes, before he reined it in and looked down, remembering his place.

He had been taught despair. He understood submission. He was learning loyalty.

It would not do to have an army of such soldiers—not until he was invincible, not until his power over lesser men was complete. Talon was too dangerous for that, too strong. But as a sword in his hand—ah.

An Owl, after all, was nothing without its Talons.

* * *

 The vault-cracker did not have the good form to have predictable timing, so the stakeout had entered its third day before he moved.

When he did, though, the jaws of the trap closed sharply.

It was the vault at Gotham City Savings Bank—additional pressure sensors had been added, and while the culprit evaded everything else and entered undetected, he set off some of these while inside. A SWAT team burst through the main vault door seconds later, only to find the place abandoned, only indifferently ransacked. With a brand new tunnel in one wall showing where their prey had gone.

Soundings of the area taken during the planning stages of the trap had revealed no tunnel, and Bruce Wayne, standing beside the Police Commissioner in the operation headquarters, reined in his scowl to a less expressive frown as the report of its existence came through the radio.

At least it failed to blow up or otherwise collapse as the SWAT officers entered it in hot pursuit. Transmitter beacons allowed support squads to keep just ahead of them on the surface—buildings and streets presented some obstacles even considering how much faster a van was than a person on foot, but the helicopter unit was matching pace in a steady line. The pursuit team's radio transmissions were broken, crackling things until they reported that they'd hit the sewer system.

"We'll never catch him down here," said one officer.

Bruce leaned in and appropriated Loeb's microphone. "Not," he agreed silkily, "if you don't start moving."

They moved.

Two of the teams went in with body cameras, for future review. One went in with a team member carrying an actual camera, which was now transmitting a live feed of the sewer system. Disgusting, but informative. Only parts of the system were still in use; there had been efforts under Bruce's father to redirect part of Gotham's waste flow somewhere other than the river.

Two of the teams all but tripped over one another when the tunnels they were searching connected, and it was only the central coordinators barking in their ears that prevented there being shots fired. They were jittery. Bruce wondered why; it wasn't as if Zsasz had harmed anyone.

When the third team stumbled over him a minute later, it was mostly luck. (Luck, and numbers; they'd filled the place so full there were few places left to run.) Bruce was fairly certain the presence of the police teams had inadvertently cut the man off from whatever his intended escape route had been, and that he had been skulking in this cul-de-sac near City Hall in hopes that they would pass by and let him double back.

He was able to make this analysis because team three was the one with the live camera feed.

"Victor Zsasz," the team leader bellowed at an unnecessary volume. "We are authorized to use deadly force in your arrest. Surrender yourself peaceably!"

The masked figure hesitated, for just a second, at the sound of his name. Then he burst into motion.

The officers were, of course, wearing helmets and armor. This did not protect them from being bowled over like ninepins, the one wearing the camera actually bouncing off a wall as the feed swung wildly, conveying nothing but chaos and darkness with a hint of filth. The bark of semiautomatic weapons filled the echoing tunnel and made the speakers in the control center blare to their utmost ability.

When the feed stabilized, it was to reveal a tumbled mess of what were supposed to be highly trained police operatives. At least three appeared to have been either shot by their colleagues or hit with ricochets in the chaos, and one of these seemed to be dead. Of the criminal there was no sign.

"Well," Bruce said acidly, as SWAT pulled themselves together and the dispatchers directed the ground and other tunnel teams toward places Zsasz was likely to be based on the new data. "I am certainly impressed by your department's performance, gentlemen."

One of the officers monitoring the CCTV feeds for the area broke in before any of the department officials could attempt to defend themselves. "Wait, here, I see him!"

Zsasz, if it was he, still wrapped in his disguise, had appeared on one of the screens, as far as possible from every active police unit, far enough he must have maintained his dead run since they'd last seen him, and found a very direct route. The camera monitored the back door of a bar, and Zsasz was the only person in the alley. He was standing quite still, exactly in the middle of the field of view. Slowly, the man stripped off his heavy sweatshirt, pulled the mask up over his head and dropped it, and—turned, unerringly, to face the camera.

Expressionless, he raised a hand in a wave.

His hair was a darker blond than in his photographs, suggesting he had not been getting much sun, and shorter—as though it had been buzzed off some months ago and ignored entirely ever since. Sweat-damp, it stood up in a low, jagged yellow crest above his forehead.

No one could have recognized the unassuming young business school graduate in this grim, muscled figure with—the Owl squinted at the grainy video—strangely geometric scarring of some kind running up his arms. Hm. Had he fallen in with a cult? Stranger things had happened.

And apparently his own experience of poverty had inspired in him an enthusiasm for the forcible redistribution of wealth. That, or his acts of charity were a cover for something else.

The police were already scrambling to intercept, but Bruce already knew they would fail. He fell back against the rear wall, far enough from the room's other occupants to prevent casual eavesdropping. When he was in his suit or the Cave he had more direct access to this system, and once had resorted to concealing communications devices in things like cufflinks to maintain some oversight while in his public character, but nowadays his cellular phone could connect him to Talon's earpiece through the Cave computers at the touch of a button, overriding the police-band feed that had been keeping the operative updated until now.

"Talon," he murmured, watching Zsasz turn away from the camera again, ready to disappear back into the lower city. "You have eyes on Zsasz." It was not a question. "I want him taken alive." Zsasz still had the legally-acquired artifacts Bruce had been keeping in the First National vault. They had not yet surfaced on the black market. He wanted them _back_.

Zsasz's mind had clearly already broken at least once. That did not mean he could not be broken further.

Making an example of him afterward would be a pleasant bonus.

The _tock_ of Talon's acknowledging tap against his earpiece meant that he was close on the target's heels.

Bruce ignored the furor filling the rest of the room, as Zsasz vanished from all police surveillance and the operation became resoundingly a failure. He was sure his focus on his 'phone call' was a relief to those making the furor, though judging by the glances coming his way there was some concern about his imminent response to their failure…or possibly about what he might be relying on instead.

It was nice that they knew who to fear.

"Engaging," Talon murmured in his ear.

A moment later there was a loud _thump_ , sharp enough that the comlink itself had probably been struck. Not broken, though, because the background noise and further, softer sounds of impact kept running down the line, and then an indistinct voice, speaking too low and far away for the microphone to receive.

And then nothing but water and wind.

"Talon. _Talon, respond!_ "

The answer was nothing but a bubbling wheeze, and the faint background hiss of the surf.

Bruce Wayne excused himself from the room.

When Owlman reached the place where the fight had been joined, he found his weapon pinned to a wooden wall with a dozen long, cheap knives, most through his uniform but a few through flesh, and what seemed to be an acupuncture needle through his larynx. That explained the failure to report.

Talon's eyes opened when he heard his master's footsteps stop in front of him.

If there had been anything of pleading or cringing in his face, Bruce would have left him there. He would work his way free eventually. But the expressionlessness into which he had coached his salvaged street urchin had never been more perfect, and so he reached forward and drew the long needle out of wood and flesh, carefully so as not to do more damage and extend the time until Talon could make a full report. With slightly less care, he tugged free the knife that had slid between radius and ulna, and stepped back to let Talon with his free right arm take care of the rest.

"Explain," he said, once his right hand was standing independent of the wall and the blood had stopped flowing.

Talon ghosted the gloved pads of his fingers over his throat, checking for soundness, then stood to attention and stated, "He got the drop on me."

"An untrained psychotic. _Ambushed_ you."

Talon trembled like a leaf. His expression remained blank. "Yes, sir. He constructed a decoy, there," one gloved hand twitched toward a shadowed corner, "hid under a tarp. Struck from behind."

Bruce flexed his fingers and waited, wielding expectation like a cudgel. The blades had all been inserted from the _front._

"He threw me against that wall," Talon continued, voice still rough from the tissue damage. "Followed the needle with the knives. He knew about me." And that, Bruce knew, was the danger of using a weapon too freely—its strengths and weaknesses could be gauged, and adapted to. His Talons had let too many opponents escape alive. "Said sorry. Left in a boat."

Bruce had the boy describe the boat in detail, then sent the information to Loeb directing an APB should be posted, though if Zsasz's mysterious competence continued he had probably already abandoned the thing. Then he turned to Talon, standing waiting for his punishment.

This was another reason it would have been useful to have two Talons. Tearing him apart, Bruce felt, would not make the right impression so soon after Zsasz's surgical strike—it would be easy to inflict more pain, but in doing so he would be inviting an equivalency between himself and the lunatic, even if in his own favor, and by this point in the conditioning process pain was not the teaching tool it had been at the beginning, anyway—but he had too much use for his Talon at present to confine him for any length of time.

Talon stood without trembling.

"I think," Bruce said at length, "that your failure tonight was adequate punishment in itself. You will be on half rations for a week as a reminder to maintain awareness at all times."

A hint of expression broke through at this clemency—a gleam of gratitude in the boy's eye, edged with something like adoration.

 _That_ slip, Bruce decided, was acceptable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With the hair and the stripes and the vivid externalization of his internal world, '90s Zsasz always feels to me like a worst-case adulthood scenario for Calvin from _Calvin & Hobbes_.


	3. Cygnus

Bruce was in a meeting when Arkham blew up.

It took him ten minutes to get the news, two to postpone the meeting, and twenty to return home, call Loeb demanding information, and change costumes. Twenty more to appear at the dock from which the Arkham Ferry launched, in the character of the outraged businessman roused from his bed with the news that one of his private hospitals had been attacked by terrorists.

The police were turning away everyone they could, but even from the shore you could make out the near edge of the giant hole that had been blown into the cliff beneath the asylum, rendering the entire structure potentially unsound, and enough boats were swarming out on the water that undoubtedly there would be numerous photographs of the damage, of varying quality, available before tomorrow.

He foresaw an uptick in his communications with the press. And no doubt no matter what tack he took, that blasted Lane woman would take advantage of Luthor and Ultraman’s respective forms of _protection_ to print whatever she pleased. He’d get her for libel one of these days.

Apparently the bomb had been set within the cliff, not the Asylum itself.

Apparently, there was an extensive tunnel system under the building, fitted with digitally locked cell doors and other up-to-date technology.

 _Apparently_ , rescue efforts had discovered evidence of torture and human experimentation in these formerly unsuspected cells. Shocking. Bruce was vocally shocked.

The casualties were reported as nine, six of them fatalities, all in uniform, though only three appeared on Arkham’s employee records. One was unrecognizable due to the state of the corpse.

It was another three hours before Bruce could get away, finish exculpating himself from all responsibility for Arkham Underground and denying all knowledge of anything that had been done to the detainees, and go down to his Cave to review whatever footage the security system had transmitted there, before shutting down.

There was less than he had hoped—the explosion had torn a truly massive hole in the power grid—but Jokester’s cell surveillance had not been touched. He started there.

He watched the hour leading up to the attack at high speed—automated analysis had not flagged anything noteworthy in the audio track here, so he would not bother with sound for now.

In the footage from Jokester’s cell, the hour went by as minutes—it was an hour so uneventful, in fact, that the only sign that this was _not_ in fact a few minutes of footage viewed at normal speed was the lightning-fast flicker of movement every time the Jokester twitched or shivered or shifted in place. His range of motion was limited enough, shackled to the wall, that it could not have been a very active video even if the man had been awake.

The need for sleep was why the prisoner was positioned as he was, his legs splayed across the ground, rather than upright—Bruce would have preferred not to allow him that comfort, but his hands of course had to be kept apart from one another to thwart attempts at escape, and a standing prisoner bound spread-eagled to the wall would, of course, suffocate eventually when his strength gave out, and his own weight collapsed his diaphragm. Making that position unsuitable for long-term restraint.

It was, of course, perfectly possible to chain someone to a wall with enough support around the torso or even legs to prevent this suffocation effect, but the more restraints the more difficulty maintaining prisoner hygiene, and besides, the chief administrator of Ward Omega disapproved of crucifixion imagery. Owlman considered this last to be more absurd superstition than anything else, but the seated posture _was_ more practical, and did allow one to physically look down on the prisoner, so he had let it stand. Or rather, he had allowed the Jokester not to.

That little joke had brought a smile to his lips at the time, but now his mouth remained a grim, furious line.

The woman responsible for monitoring the camera feeds during this shift had been killed in the bombing, so Owlman could not expect her report. (She had been one of his best interrogation specialists, and he resented the loss.) As the timestamp approached the critical window, completely uneventfully, he dropped into normal playback speed, and kept watching.

There followed several seconds of the same still, silent scene of a chained man, shivering occasionally in his sleep, disfigured face sagging toward his chest. Ridiculous purple hair lay in much the same mussed patterns of neglect as Zsasz’s, though much shorter, as it had been cropped to nearly nothing on his admission to Arkham seven weeks ago. (The stated reasoning being concern that the patient might attempt to hang himself with it at its original length.)

The rumpled mess of a clown had not been interesting at first sight, let alone after five uneventful minutes.

Then Bruce’s speakers burst out into the pounding, cracking sound of a mighty explosion tearing a hole in the only external wall of the subterranean complex.

The camera vibrated in place, blurring the image, and the lights dimmed, but watching carefully enough still allowed Bruce to make out the slight shift in tension that was the Jokester either waking or coming to attention at the sound. He did not twitch, or shift a finger, but he was definitely awake. Unsurprised? Or just cautious? In his weeks in this cell he had learned to be wary of the all-seeing cameras.

Slowly, faint traces of a heavy white smoke seeped out of the ventilation system. According to reports from surviving staff and detainees it had been thick in the corridors, ‘like a pea-soup fog!’ and in some of the rooms, especially those cracked open by the blast. It had _not_ been directly the result of the explosion, nor had it come from anything on fire; Bruce fully expected that the forensic examination, when completed, would discover some carefully situated device or devices that had produced the smokescreen. Nothing moved onscreen for long seconds but the smoke’s slowly drifting tongues.

Then the raw stone wall to the Jokester’s right abruptly trembled, as though caught in a localized aftershock.

Arkham Underground was burrowed deep into the cliff. The Ward Omega tunnel system had grown to be extensive over the years, and while great care had been taken to maintain structural integrity…in some places where a number of rooms were close together, the walls were far weaker than the doors.

It seemed someone had shared this information. ( _Who_ , was the question—no patient had never left, and the staff were all heavily vetted and had everything to lose from exposure. He would have to run through every one of them with a fine-toothed comb—though likely as not the informer was one of tonight’s dead, a loose end cleaned up on the way out. That was what _he_ would have done. But he could speculate later, once he had all the data.)

The trembling wall cracked, shattered, and fell in, and there in the newly broken gap stood the Human Crocodile, alongside the masked man who was so _clearly_ Harvey Dent although he had never been able to prove it, both of them holding sledgehammers. They stood, for a moment, seeming surprised the stone had given way, and then lowered their hammers as the dust fell. Exchanged a glance, blank white fabric and inhuman scaly features all but unreadable, and crossed the newly created threshold in unison. Moments later, they were joined by the much smaller forms of Enigma and Harlequin.

All four looked at the still-unmoving figure sitting in its shackles. Another round of glances exchanged, and finally Harlequin spoke, her voice slightly distorted by the damaged recording equipment. “Mister J? Honey bear?”

The woman was ridiculous, but Jokester finally raised his head. He blinked, once, very slowly, as though honestly baffled by what he saw, eyebrows furrowed with the difficulty of thought, and Owlman watched the sight of his condition send a ripple of distress through the rabble—the red new scars running up from under his shirt, over his collarbone to the base of his throat, the mottled bruising; the telltale sunken look to his eyes that showed how little he had been permitted of either water or sleep; the thinness of starvation rations. The glaze of drugs blanking his eyes.

His followers stared back at him, huddling like a flock of frightened pigeons, and the sight of that disconnect, the gap that had opened between them and their leader at his hand, brought a sharp satisfaction to Owlman’s chest even though his perfect prison had been penetrated and exposed.

There was _nothing_ he could not destroy.

“Oh my _god_ ,” said Enigma just as the tension reached the point where it would have to shatter one way or another, his voice so hushed you might have thought he was making a formal religious invocation in a church, rather than uttering casual blasphemy. “ _J._ You look like your face is being eaten by _purple fungus_.”

And then he…grinned. Brief and smug, like he had just scored a _point_ of some kind. Like this was a _game._

The Jokester paused for another moment of dull incomprehension, and then animation sprung back into his haggard face as he barked out a _laugh_. “Aw, man! My secret’s out! Well, now you guys all know why I’m normally such a fan of a _close shave!_ ”

The clown was, as a matter of fact, one of those men who simply could not grow a beard. Bruce had no idea whether this was a genetically predetermined inability or, like the man’s unnatural pigmentation, a result of the acid damage, and did not actually care. Enigma had described the result, after these weeks without access to a razor, accurately enough.

Infuriatingly, that small thing seemed to have entirely dispelled all the horror Owlman’s efforts had achieved, and he thought vengefully of eviscerations and dismemberments as the little rescue force flowed forward, all vigor, to attack their leader’s bonds. He _would_ kill one of those impertinent madmen one of these days. It was only bad luck and their overall unimportance that had protected them this long.

If this was their doing, they were no longer strategically insignificant.

He wondered how much pride they would take in having inconvenienced him enough to attract the full weight of his displeasure, before he crushed them.

“So,” the Jokester croaked brightly, like a particularly impudent crow. His lower lip had cracked when he opened his mouth, and now blood began to trickle down his chin. Disgustingly, his tongue darted at the escaping liquid. “You guys threw a whole party just for me?”

There was a persistent slur to his words, and they came slower than usual, but it had _clearly_ been too long since his last dosing. Perhaps he had been carefully exaggerating the effects of the experimental drugs, or perhaps he was building up a resistance. And Bruce had not yet moved on to the more permanent procedures—after all, to experience the horror of losing one’s mind, one had to be aware of what was being lost. The self must be stripped away drop by drop. Ideally, in the end, there would be just enough individual ego left to know that it had once been someone, and to suffer. It was not a process that could be rushed.

Next time, he vowed, he would carve the clown’s brain out _personally_.

“Nah,” rumbled the Crocodile, running his claws over the anchor points of the manacles, measuring their sturdiness, because apparently brute force really was all these upstarts understood. “Got invitations.”

Enigma nodded, splaying his fingers over his captain’s bound wrists in a way Owlman had come to recognize as using the scanners in the computer-glove technology he had defrauded from Wayne Enterprises. “They said if we wanted to bust you out, tonight would be a good time to move.”

“We expected a trap, really, sweetie, but we didn’t want to ignore it in case it was legitimate, so we were close enough to see when the cliff blew up.”

“And then you’d better _believe_ we moved in,” said Enigma. “Hey, J, what’s got nine lives and holds up the roof?”

The Jokester stared blankly for a second, and then lit up. “Cat-er- _pillar!_ ”

And all five of the loons laughed like that drivel was the very height of wit.

Enigma shook his head over the cuffs—the most complex, inescapable ones money could buy, though not, unfortunately, truly unpickable—and rummaged in his rucksack before passing an iron wedge up to the Crocodile, who lifted his hammer again and with a series of carefully-placed mighty blows, shattered the left-hand chain anchor free of the wall. Jokester’s arm dropped like a stone, and Harlequin caught it just before his hand could reach the ground.

“Ow, thanks, _ow,_ ” the clown said, blinking hard and twitching his fingers. “Didn’ even realize just how numb I’d got, haha! Don’t stop, the guards upstairs are bad enough, you dunwanna see what the guys down here are packing.”

His rescuers obeyed, and a minute and a half later Dent half-carried the man out through their improvised exit, still trailing his chains, and the four of them were lost to the cameras.

Bruce turned off the useless feed, sat back in his chair, and glowered.

So.

It had _not_ been the increasingly aggravating knot of vigilante idiots, formed around the most persistent challenger of his authority, that had shattered his little island of discipline. Their involvement had been purely opportunistic, and while the smoke was certainly their contribution, that had apparently been all they contributed. That, and tearing Jokester from his shackles. And, quite probably, unsealing half the doors and bringing down the rest of the power grid, but that might just as easily have been the work of the primary perpetrator.

Who had finally escalated from vault robbery, and found a secure facility even more worth breaking open.

Zsasz. It had to have been _Zsasz,_ that pathetic joke of a man. Just another ruined lunatic, jamming the gears of Bruce’s perfectly calibrated machine.

He would learn those gears were capable of crushing anything that got caught in them.

He would _learn._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note added because I made a dumb joke that I want to explain in case someone besides me thinks it's funny: the 'Cygnus' of the chapter title is J. Because swans are white. Every chapter is titled after a constellation that reflects a principle character of that chapter, because I get a kick out of that kind of thing.


	4. Vulpecula

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Metro-Narrows bridge is actually from a period where official maps showed Metropolis and Gotham across Delaware Bay from one another and linked by this bridge. Which arrangement really makes only slightly more sense than Bludhaven being straight across a heavily bridged river from Gotham and their not having a shared metro culture.
> 
> Anyway, I stole it. As far as I'm concerned Gotham is a New England city, though--DC's patched in too much Bostonian history for it to be otherwise, and also the weather is distinctively dreadful--and Metropolis is probably south of New York.

Every law-enforcement officer and half the criminals in Gotham were on the lookout for Zsasz, and so were half the rest of the city. The man might be brilliant, but he was working alone—posting a reward for information on the Jokester had only run him to ground a few times over the years, and his contacts had always warned him in time to evacuate ahead of the strike, but Zsasz lacked such an extensive network. If he was in the city, he'd be found.

It took three days to get a solid lead. On the evening of the fourth day, a team of Owls scared Zsasz from his hiding place, and a detachment of police closed in once he showed his face openly. Unsurprisingly, they did not catch him. But they made him run.

Owlman could armor up without assistance, of course, but it went more quickly with Talon's aid. They were long past the point in his conditioning where there need be concern for assassination attempts, and Bruce felt free to ignore his right hand as he knelt to tighten a greave over his shin, and mull over his plans.

He could not bring order to his city, or to the world, as long as there were pockets of rebellion, but it was not the overt acts that troubled him—most of them were petty and impotent. It was the impulse they represented, and the indirect support they received. Zsasz had disrupted several of his contingency plans by stealing his belongings, but what really concerned him was that he could not determine even now the pattern behind his acts. Whether he and his had been targeted specifically. Whether Zsasz had had any idea what he had taken. Whether his distribution of cash had been a maneuver to shake them off his trail, or to secure goodwill with the populace, or simply a simpleminded gesture of goodwill.

The clown could surprise him, still, from time to time, but he was rarely left so _baffled_ as he had been by this enigma. But that would all end tonight.

Talon handed him his mask, and he stood still, for a moment, looking into its empty eyes.

Once, the armor and the owl mask had belonged to Talon. One deadly, menacing example of _strigidae_ to do the work of a whispering, cowardly council of _tytonidae_ —a new mask, a new armor had been devised for each new Talon, the theme being one of the most exciting decisions of every generation in the stagnant Court he had taken over.

That night years ago, he had struck down the Talon of the old order and claimed his mask along with the newly-created throne at the heart of the Court. The armor he wore now was of his own design, a coalescence of tradition and his own initiative, the weight of the Court's power leashed under his will.

Taking over the ancient, moribund order of his own class and galvanizing it back into action had been the first step in his program, because it was an important link in the chain. But he had never allowed himself to forget that it was only a link.

It is never enough, he had explained once to one of his most trusted lieutenants, to have any one kind of power: legitimate authority can be subverted by criminal sway, commercial might by social inertia, and so on to the end. The only way to rule, to _truly_ rule, is to establish a stranglehold on all forms of influence, so that no matter from what walk of life an individual may come, no matter to what authority they look, no matter what they hope or fear in this life or another, they will have no choice but to submit.

One day he would not need separate personas to achieve this. One day, he would no longer need the Owlman.

But for now, there were few things as satisfying as getting his own hands around the throats of the defiant.

He settled the mask over his face, feeling it lock into its sockets at the upper edge of the gorget, and flexed his fingers in heavy gauntlets. Zsasz would _pay._

* * *

Bruce had known that if his subordinates carried out the plan correctly, Zsasz would try to escape over the bridge. He had not expected to arrive to find him halfway up one of the towers.

The Metro-Narrows was an unusually long bridge, with seven support towers rising up across the space where the Gotham River broadened into the bay, nine segments of trestle suspended from arcing cables. Bruce's grandfather had initially proposed the project, and his father had helped see it to completion. It had not produced the vibrant economic revitalization they had hoped for, but it _had_ opened a rundown sector of the southern harbor district for urban renewal; numerous young professionals now commuted across the Metro-Narrows daily between their housing in the reclaimed part of the Narrows and their workplaces in the business and financial sectors on the opposite side of the river.

Why Zsasz thought that fleeing into the realm of the polished high-rise would help him any is hard to guess, but even a bad option is better than none at all.

This did not explain what had inspired the man to start climbing the thing, but observing that he was Bruce banked about on his glider and caught an updraft that gave him enough height to settle onto the top of the bridge support just before Zsasz completed his climb.

He half hoped the man would startle, lose his hold, and fall. Bruce would have to catch him, of course, for interrogation, but it would have been satisfying. He just raised an eyebrow slightly when his head appeared over the edge, though, and kept climbing.

It wasn't a terribly large space, the top of the third tower. The bridge was forty feet across, and the towers twenty wide; eight hundred square feet would have made an acceptable apartment for one of those commuting employees, but it left the rat nowhere to run. He seemed even less troubled by this than the clown would have been.

"Hello," he said. Pleasant and even, as if they were acquaintances meeting in the street. Thrust his hands into his pockets and left them there. "It's been a while."

Zsasz had never laid eyes on the Owl before. "You've been missing," he growled.

"For over a year," Zsasz agreed. "How long did it take them to notice?" There was no self-pity Owlman could detect. Disdain, possibly.

"As long as it took your landlord to get tired of waiting for rent."

"That makes sense," Zsasz agreed. "I expect she sold all my stuff."

"You don't seem to mind."

"Well, I did walk away without paying her. You want to know why," he added, a little less disinterested. Leaned forward a little. "Why I set off on a crusade instead of making the best of things, or giving in. What the _point_ is. Because you can't guess, can you?"

His voice had dropped, a little—not enough for the wind to snatch it away, but enough to underscore the confiding tone he had suddenly adopted. Bruce did not much care to be confided in.

However, once the Owls had him in custody, he might be less willing to give such useful insight into his psychology. And Bruce was angry, but not so much so that he wanted to take any longer than necessary breaking him. Let him talk.

"I'd wasted more money than I had," Zsasz told him. "Made stupid choices, trying to get out of the consequences. None of my friends would talk to me anymore, and no one would loan me any money.

"I could still have gotten a job, probably, somewhere, but I didn't know how to work, and besides I didn't _deserve_ it. I'd been handed everything and pissed it away looking for happiness, let down everyone and everything that ever mattered. So I went to a bridge, one night. Went out alone under the moon, looking down at the river. My parents had died in water; it felt right."

They were on a bridge now. Even if he had not had cause to hold him for interrogation, Bruce would not want to give the man a death that felt right, and he made a note not to let him fall. "Obviously you survived."

"Yes. There was a man sleeping on the bridge. He woke up, looked at me, told me not to be stupid. I told him to go to hell. Then he said if I was jumping, I should give him my wallet first. I ignored him—he was ruining my dramatic death scene. So he pulled a knife."

Zsasz cracked out a dry little laugh. "I was there to die, and he tried to threaten me. _And it worked._ " Shook his head. "I panicked, fought back. Got the knife off him. And there I was, feeling alive again, more alive than ever in my life."

Bruce didn't care, but he could picture it: Deserted bridge, pathetic beggar, the first taste of real power in a life where complacency had shaded into hopelessness. "You didn't kill him, did you." He made no effort to keep the disapproval from his voice.

"I might have. He expected me to." Zsasz finally pulled his hands from his pockets, and there was a knife in his right—ludicrously long; he must have had it strapped to his thigh and ripped the bottom out of his pocket for access—whose hilt his fingers worked on, kneading it like clay.

It was less cheap than the ones he had used against Talon. Not elegant, though. The handle was rubberized for a surer grip.

"That's when it happened," Zsasz said, and his voice was still a distant, musing thing but it was losing even the veneer of calm. "I saw the despair in his eyes, and I understood."

"That your reasons for dying were as pathetic as the rest of you?" Bruce suggested.

Zsasz took no offense, but drove on with the devotion of the true fanatic. "No, I knew _that_. I understood why _he_ was still alive."

Bruce felt his lip curl. People's eternal need to seek comfort in the most inane and internally inconsistent mental constructs never ceased to amaze or disgust him.

"We're all dying, you know. It's common knowledge. Every second from the time we're born. Time, tick-tick- _tick_. But up until you die, you're alive.

"And people don't realize that. That they're alive. Everyone walking around in their private dreams, trying to cushion themselves, keeping everything far enough away that it won't hurt. _Everybody._ Hiding, sleepwalking. Not seeing themselves or each other straight on. But if you let go of the fear…there are no reasons for dying. Only reasons that it's hard to live. And every one of them just makes a better picture, seen from far enough away."

"Then why go out of your way to make their lives easier?" Owlman asked. He supposed it was possible that rather than being mildly incompetent at charity Zsasz just thought people were more entertaining when they had more resources, even if the result of those resources was being arrested, but he wasn't convinced.

"They can't appreciate it until they can get some distance," the thief replied, as though his suspicion of Bruce's stupidity had been confirmed, rather than the reverse. "Look up at the stars and down at themselves and see that neither's brighter than the other."

Owlman's lip curled back far enough to bare his teeth. The sentimentality was revolting.

"I realized," Zsasz said, tracing one of the little nests of radiating lines carved on his neck, eyes wide with fanaticism in a way that Bruce only liked to see when the object was loyalty to himself, "that life is pain. And that's okay. That's just _fine._ My problem was trying to hide from it. Run from it. I've learned to _embrace_ the edge."

"Is _that_ what those are," Owlman said, flicking a disgusted claw toward the scarification, crosshatched along the skin of the man's arms. The shapes were like asterisks, but drawn with four lines each instead of three, and there was no chance they were anything but intentional. "The result of embracing edges?"

"Every time."


	5. Cepheus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, final chapter. Happy Halloween weekend!

Zsasz struck first.

Bruce hadn't been expecting it. After all those months of skulking, indirect provocations—after all these years of fighting the clown, who attacked head-on only when he was either furious or determined to keep all of Bruce's attention on himself and away from somebody else—after all these minutes of evangelization of the man's personal madness—he had expected the détente to last until he himself got sick of talking and decided to attack.

In spite of surprise, he managed to deflect the lunge enough that it skidded over the rigid armor plate across his chest, cutting into the Kevlar but failing to sink into the flex-point where it had been aimed.

Rather than take the opportunity of putting him on the defensive to recover safely, Zsasz ducked in closer to his larger opponent. Bruce deflected the knife again, struck a blow across the face—narrowly evaded a punch to the throat.

"When I knock down a wall. Wake someone up. You have to _look at the stars_ ," Zsasz insisted. And neatly wove around the Owl's next attack, stabbing down at his arm with the point of his blade. It stopped against the armor, but the impact was still entirely too direct.

This was proving less simple than anticipated. He hadn't brought any weapons besides his hands. Well. His hands were weapon enough, even if this vermin was proving too slippery to efficiently beat to death. He curled fingers tipped with diamond-hard claws.

The Owl slashed at Zsasz's throat and drew a narrow line of blood, but the madman didn't even seem to feel it, and his knife cut a rent in the Owlman's cape that ruined it for flight. Bruce clenched his teeth, surged forward, and threw the man clear over his head, to slam spine-down flat against the steel girders of the bridge structure.

The instant he landed, before he should have been able to draw breath again, Zsasz rolled, a move that years ago Owlman would have taken for suicidal, but after so long fighting the Jokester he knew to expect the madman swinging himself around the underside of the girder and popping up behind him—except he spun, and Zsasz was not there. Slowly, he turned a full circle, the distant noises of the night loud in his sudden seeming solitude, and then leaned out over the edge of the tower to see if there was, anticlimactically, a broken body on the bridge-deck below.

And _that_ was when Zsasz launched himself from behind.

Bruce's gauntlets threw sparks as he gripped the bridge cables to slow his fall, and the stink of hot metal was sharp in his nose as he climbed back up, hand over hand. He would break Zsasz slowly, so slowly, with fire and water and the sharp edges he thought he was past fearing, and once he'd wrung everything out of him then perhaps he would let him die.

He sunk his claws into Zsasz's thigh in passing even as he launched himself back onto the top of the tower, but his enemy drew back and the gouge was shallow. They clashed, armored hands against blade, Bruce's advantage of bulk offset by Zsasz's in reach, his skill countered by Zsasz's speed.

And then Zsasz was there, in his space, and the Owl cursed whatever quirk of madness gave some lunatics the ability to move without being predicted even by his trained senses. He closed the hole in his defense as fast as he could, ducking his chin to minimize access to the two weak points along his throat that were the sacrifice for being able to turn his head.

A crack, and the brass pommel of Zsasz's knife had driven into the left lens of his mask, shattered through it and continued with enough force to bruise the rim of bone below his eye socket.

The pain hit him at the same time as fury and incredulity, and he nearly staggered with the combination even as his own right hand chopped up, striking the wrist of the deluded poseur who had dared to injure him, in a cleanly disarming strike that would leave that hand unusable for days, if Zsasz survived the night. The knife went spiraling off to plummet into the distant water. This gave the Owlman all the time he needed to recover a stable stance even as he _seethed_.

He was going to have a black eye for over a week. He was going to have to recall having made an error and let someone this utterly worthless leave a mark on him every time he saw a mirror or felt the ache, or some inane comment was made on the discoloration.

He lashed out in a crack of ribs, but Zsasz hit the ground and bounced upright again in the way the accursed clown always did, as though insanity insulated them better against pain than all his training and self-discipline. At least Zsasz wasn't smiling.

The maniac pulled another knife from somewhere and struck—Bruce caught the blow on his vambrace and they strained against one another for long seconds, Zsasz's full weight bearing down against Owlman's right arm, the heavy knife unable to slide as it caught in the jagged cresting line of featherlike blades that ran along the outer edge of the gauntlet.

"You and me, Bruce," the man whispered across the six inches separating their faces, gazing into one shattered and one whole and staring lens as though they were human eyes, as though he could stare right through the mask to Bruce's real face and that was how he knew, and something flickered momentarily in the Owl's chest that he recognized as _fear_. " _We're the same_. Searching for meaning in a hollow world."

Bruce set his teeth and pulled the catch that launched the vambrace-spikes at his enemy.

The two of them spun apart, each dodging the blades scything into his face, and when Bruce laid eyes again on his opponent the man was smiling, blood from the deep slice that now ran up his forehead and across his hairline spreading down to trickle over his exposed teeth. "That's right," he said, mopping a forearm back along his brow, as though that would prevent the blood from running into his eyes, rather than just smear some of it up through the wild yellow crest of his hair. "You understand that much. _Fight for what you want_."

" _Silence,_ " Owlman spat, and wasn't sure why he had bothered, because it wasn't as if the vault robber was making enough sense to be annoying.

"But what do you want?" Zsasz whispered.

Bruce's hands itched for a better weapon. "Your death would be a good start."

Zsasz snorted. "What do you _really_ want?" he asked, like a schoolteacher whose student had made a halfhearted stab at solving a problem. "You could slip the world into your pocket tomorrow and it wouldn't help. _Think._ "

Bruce lashed out with his claws and all the rage in him, the rage that he usually tried to bite back behind his teeth until it could be useful, that he took out in spurts and dashes against anyone who irritated him but never, ever _unleashed_ , the rage that even the clown could not draw out of him so wholly with so little effort. It swelled in his chest and made him hit a little harder, a little faster, and yet still he could not land a killing blow and to add insult to injury his opponent kept _encouraging_ him. "That's right. Go on. Let it all out. Get through it, Bruce. Figure it _out_."

Finally he began to slow, his breath coming in great heaving bursts as much from rage as exertion, and when Zsasz backed away again Owlman let him have the distance for now.

His ears had picked up a metallic reverberation that was neither of them, and while the police might arrive at some point when someone noticed the fight atop the Metro-Narrows, he was fairly sure this was the response to a summons he had sent out some minutes before.

Sure enough, a few seconds later Talon climbed over the edge of the tower behind him. Observed the blood on his claws and the way Zsasz was standing, battered but whole and all insouciance. Asked, after a beat, in that low, submissive voice he had been taught but which never quite achieved the perfect tonelessness of his precursor's, "Shall I, my Lord?"

"No," Bruce bit out. "My sword." He reached behind him, and a second later the hilt was laid in his palm. He gripped it, and pulled, and the long steely note as it was drawn from the sheath rang softly into the night. The Owl raised his blade.

It was a magnificent weapon. One meter of double-edged blue steel, razor-sharp, gleaming in the light that rose from the bridge. The hilt was worked into an intricate silver-scrollworked owl, gazing out pitilessly from inset amber eyes, and the pommel was a raptor's grasping claw wrapped around an intricate model of the Earth.

"Yours is bigger," Zsasz acknowledged, sibilant voice somehow conveying sly insinuation that would have made the distrait, garden-party-attending young gentleman he had once been blush furiously. "Am I meant to be impressed?"

Owlman bared his teeth, and attacked.

Zsasz was injured almost at once, now that he no longer had the advantage of reach, but only superficially. Bruce crosscut a number of his asterisk scars, which was met with annoying unconcern until he gave a twist to his blade and, instead of the attempted death-blow the man was prepared to dodge, sliced a strip of marked skin clean away.

The madman glanced down, then drew a sharp breath, and slapped his empty hand momentarily over the shallow wound, as if to cover his stolen record. When he lifted his eyes he was finally, slightly, visibly angry. "Like that, is it?" he asked, and Bruce sneered. This could be considered payback for his broken lens.

Talon moved, a directionless flicker, as though he felt he should be contributing but knew better than to interfere. "Stay," Bruce ordered him, and Zsasz hissed through his teeth and flashed forward.

They clashed one more time, all ringing steel and harsh breath, and when they stilled again Bruce was sure this had been the last. Pain shot through him, but it was drowned by victory.

Zsasz's knife had sunk itself to the hilt in Owlman's side, punching through the Kevlar, between the plates, and into flesh. But in the same moment Owlman's sword had slid into the scarred man's chest, between ribs and out his back again, so cleanly that blood had not even yet begun to flow.

There was no surprise in the dying man's eyes. Only two points of red, like fire.

Zsasz let go of his knife, leaving it in his enemy's side as of no consequence, and seized hold instead of Owlman's hands where they gripped the sword hilt. He was smiling again, but incongruous amusement had worn out its power to unsettle Bruce years ago. (At least the clown was good for something.) Zsasz leaned forward over their joined hands, pulling the blade deeper into his body as he did so, apparently without noticing. "Wake up, Bruce," he advised, very kindly.

And then let go and took two rapid steps back, the sword sliding out of him smooth as silk in a gout of blood, and pitched backward over the edge of the bridge.

He had kicked off hard enough as he jumped that the wind did not drive him back over the surface of the bridge or into the side of one of the trestles, but allowed him to plummet cleanly toward the river. A scream trailed behind him as he fell, which ought to have been the most ordinary thing he had done in these long months of cat and mouse, except that it was impossible to miss the note of triumph.

The black water swallowed him, and he was gone.

 _Gone._ Escaped into nonbeing.

Anger almost swallowed the Owl whole again. He wanted to throw himself after the lunatic, despite the dive being almost certain death even if he were not bleeding from a deep stab wound, and drag him out of the water and shake and crush him until he answered the questions Bruce actually cared about asking. He wanted to grab the nearest warm body and tear into it until his hands stopped shaking.

He was keenly aware of Talon behind him, standing so still he had ceased to breathe. "Retrieve the corpse," he ordered. Talon did not even stop to bow before he was climbing down toward the water. He had the authority to requisition boats and search equipment from Bruce's other subordinates if it proved necessary. Owlman shoved the whole mess aside. Compartmentalize. Control.

Hands steadying, Bruce pressed a strip of wound-sealing gum over the puncture in his side, stopping the bleeding, which would have to do until he reached medical facilities and the internal damage could be examined and repaired.

Talon had not brought him a replacement glider along with the sword, and climbing down would require remaining exposed on the side of the structure for entirely too long. Owlman launched himself over the corner of the tower and slid down the cables, trailing sparks, ignoring the flare of pain in his side.

They never did locate Zsasz's body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's comics, he probably survived.


End file.
